(Seen by my mates using an) Ubuntu release.
While I was far away from sense and civilisation, or indeed close to same than I am usually, depending on viewpoint, the local (jolly nice) boxshifters at Novatech sent me a circular. In this, they were pleased to announce that for what may or may not have been the bargain price of £70, I could have an mini-ITX Atom board in a box. Since I've been meaning to replace the somewhat Hooverphonic HP Kayak under the bench with something smaller, quieter and faster, this seemed like a Good Thing.
I ordered one on the cheapo delivery option, expecting it to arrive after the weekend we were in That London. It turned up the next day.
The memory + second NIC I ordered arrived ditto.
The thing I don't have is a SATA DVD drive, but I do have a spare 1/2Tb drive laying about and the USB drive that recently held the backup version of talk + slides.
When mucking about with tranferring ISO images to USB objects, the handy thing to have is a spare Unix box.
Beardian-7 didn't work. Sod's law. While the processor is nominally 64-bit, the board (and now we discover why they were cheap...) isn't.
Generate i386 USB image. Boots. Moans about NIC firmware. Generic Realtek firmware mostly doesn't work.
Some poking on the internets reveals that anything less than version (mumble) is horrid and smells of wee.
I can already see which way this is going and I have already bagged a copy of Wandering Womble, which boots, spots both NICs and generally behaves.
Shame about the screen, but it's going to run headless anyway.
Things to do
- Persuade it not to do anything clever and just give me a text console.
- Buy another 1/2Tb drive and mirror the things up like an adult.
- Work out how to do all the useful things that are easy in BSD, but using IPTables.
- Remember not to do this again.
I ordered one on the cheapo delivery option, expecting it to arrive after the weekend we were in That London. It turned up the next day.
The memory + second NIC I ordered arrived ditto.
The thing I don't have is a SATA DVD drive, but I do have a spare 1/2Tb drive laying about and the USB drive that recently held the backup version of talk + slides.
When mucking about with tranferring ISO images to USB objects, the handy thing to have is a spare Unix box.
Beardian-7 didn't work. Sod's law. While the processor is nominally 64-bit, the board (and now we discover why they were cheap...) isn't.
Generate i386 USB image. Boots. Moans about NIC firmware. Generic Realtek firmware mostly doesn't work.
Some poking on the internets reveals that anything less than version (mumble) is horrid and smells of wee.
I can already see which way this is going and I have already bagged a copy of Wandering Womble, which boots, spots both NICs and generally behaves.
Shame about the screen, but it's going to run headless anyway.
Things to do
- Persuade it not to do anything clever and just give me a text console.
- Buy another 1/2Tb drive and mirror the things up like an adult.
- Work out how to do all the useful things that are easy in BSD, but using IPTables.
- Remember not to do this again.